Last week, the papers and TV rolling news were full of the story of The Home Office’s ‘Go Home’ poster vans; mobile billboard ads aimed at encouraging illegal immigrants in London to go home of their own accord or face arrest.

Quite rightly, this did not go down well with many people. Unite Union-leader Len McCluskey and new peer Doreen Lawrence said that the messages on vans were hateful and involved racial profiling. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, called them ‘stupid’ and ‘offensive’. Even the UKIP leader Nigel Farage condemned the vans saying they were ‘not the British way’.

But I disagree with LibDem-leader Nick Clegg when he says that the vans were ‘driving aimlessly around North London’ and that they are ‘not a very clever way’ of tackling the issue.

We need to put this in context. The Conservative Party has had a pretty bad year when it comes to the issue of immigration. UKIP thrashed the Conservatives in the local council elections in March partly due to the Tories’ inability to address people’s concerns about immigration. Nigel Farage, the self-styled man of the people, has been on every TV news programme and every newspaper giving the British voters a clear, strong line on immigration. David Cameron and the Tory leadership has kept a dignified near-silence. Until now.

Enter the immigration vans. Every media outlet picked up on the story. Shots of the van, along with a direct call to action text number were, and still are, in all major newspapers. The coverage has spread to TV and Radio. Even the Nation’s favourite chat show –  ITV Daybreak – ran the story.

Is it possible that the Home Office has taken a small budget and generated, via a controversial ambush marketing campaign, huge amounts of publicity on purpose? I believe so.

The voting public now know that The Home Office is serious about waging war on immigration and the Conservative Party didn’t have to pay for a 10m door drop, nor an expensive TV ad campaign. They didn’t need a trendy celebrity spokesperson nor the latest background track from a number one seller.

The Home Office paid for six vans to travel around a tiny area of London for one week only.  My guess is the whole campaign cost less than £20,000 – reportedly just £10,000 – and took two weeks to devise and implement. Yet this campaign has generated millions of pounds worth of coverage.

Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryan Air, recently said in an interview with Marketing Week that he loved all his negative publicity as it put ‘bums on his seats’. Benetton shot to global fame with their risqué ads.

Could it be that our Home Office, which we believe to be filled with stuffed shirts and box tickers, decided to outwit us all? Call the media’s bluff?  I can imagine the conversations around The Home Office table: “It’s controversial sir, but I guarantee it’ll get the Nation talking!’ And it certainly did.

There is a growing trend for clients to draw their agencies together into a team know as a Cross-Agency Team. The idea is that they happily collaborate, work together in perfect harmony and produce amazing 360 campaigns. However, in my experience this is very rarely the case. But if managed correctly, Cross-Agency Teams can and do work very well.

So what if you’re a client and you’ve set up a Cross-Agency Team. And that Cross-Agency team is starting to become a little cross? What do you do?

8 golden rules for making Cross-Agencies less cross

1. Put all your agencies on a retainer and make sure that they know exactly what they’re going to be paid.

2. Be crystal clear which area of work each agency controls. If you’re not, problems will escalate rapidly. For example with a roadshow: is it activated by the PR or Experiential agency?

3. Put your best person in charge of your Cross-Agency Team. It needs a strong manager, someone who is at a high enough level to be a decision maker without recourse to others. Nothing aggravates agencies more that the thought that a junior member of staff is dealing with them and then having to wait weeks for decisions when they get passed up the line. Be commercially aware – time is money for the agencies and for you.

4. Never hand out a brief and tell agencies to coordinate between themselves and respond back. Who takes the lead?  What happens if they disagree over strategy? This is a lazy approach, hardly ever generates clear-sighted thinking and often results in more meetings, more time being wasted and unhappy agencies.

5. Be clear on budget split. Don’t invite agencies who won’t benefit financially – if you wouldn’t work for free, why should they?

6. Know exactly what your objectives are and make sure the team buys in to them right from the start.

7. Insist the team contains the best brains from your agencies and don’t be afraid to support opinions from those outside of the Ad agency planning department.

8. Make sure it’s an equal partnership. The one thing that always sinks Cross-Agency Teams is inequality. Don’t fall into the trap of favouring the Above-The-Line agency.  Make sure you treat everyone equally in terms of decisions, money and time.

Cross-Agency Teams don’t have to be cross. They can work and if you stick to these golden rules you will end up with a team that delivers outstanding results.

When marketing agencies apply to do a project for a company or government department, take part in a tender or get to the stage of costing out a campaign, they run up against the biggest pitfall in every medium to large-scale project: their client’s procurement department.

Procurement departments now rule the roost when negotiating agency fees. Their overarching objective is to decrease the agency fee and hence dictate the structure of the team on the project; they usually have no real understanding of what a marketing project entails and they are concentrating purely on outlay not on results.

The poor old marketing agency feels they have little choice but to reduce fees and cut the scope of work so as to remain profitable – and secure the work. However the work taken away from the agency still has to be carried out and 9 times out of ten these jobs are picked up by the company’s brand manager.

The in-house brand manager may have little or no experience of managing the different aspects of a complicated marketing project. One person in a company, or even a small team of in-house people, can’t possibly be expert in all the aspects including web build, sourcing, terms and conditions, legal contracts, print specification, consumer messaging etc. That’s why they need to get an agency in the first place.

Agencies on the other hand have years of experience managing all the elements of the marketing mix and would be able to control and add value to all the things that have had to be picked up by the brand manager.

So the brand manager struggles under the weight of the ‘new’ role; the project loses consistency, mistakes are made, quality is foregone and the whole campaign is compromised.

So it ends up as a lose/lose, when it could so easily, for a few extra quid, have been a huge win/win for everyone. What a damn shame.

The Conservative party has a trust issue – a big one. And Labour and LibDems are not that far behind in the mistrust stakes. In fact, these days, politicians in general are suffering from a massive credibility crisis. The electorate don’t believe they’ll stick to their promises and whatever they say seems to be making it worse.

McDonald’s faced similar trust issues ten years ago, globally and specifically in the UK. Their loyal consumers and potential customers decided their offering was substandard; their food regarded as unhealthy junk, an opinion reinforced by the film Fast Food Nation and the documentary Supersize Me.

McDonald’s started losing money at an alarming rate. But they didn’t give in – not that you would expect them to. Instead they faced their challenges and took rapid action. They improved quality, rallied the troops, got their crisis management in order, honed their marketing messaging and made a concerted effort to win back the nation’s hearts. Basically they spent money to stop themselves losing more money.

First they invested heavily in the finest ingredients, knowing that provenance was one of the key touch points to consumer satisfaction. They started using 100 per cent British beef, identifying the farmers from whom the meat came. They changed their UK advertising to ensure that it was all about the product. They revamped their photography – some shots taking months to prepare, and used some of the world’s best food photographers.

The changed how they spoke about themselves dramatically and ensured that globally all their advertising and direct mail had consistent quality messages. They started using images of fields, crops and families to highlight their food credentials. Everything they did directly countered the idea that their food was unhealthy junk. And it worked.

Public faith was restored and now McDonald’s sales are at an all-time high. So what can the Conservative party learn? They can get professional help to start tackling their trust issue head-on; start taking their branding seriously, get their messages right, develop strategic campaigns – and stop sticking their head in the sand and hoping it’s all going to go away.

I believe entrepreneurs are born with the ability to spot a good opportunity and make money. I think they have a natural propensity to spot gaps in the market and exploit them. I don’t think you necessarily have to learn how to become an entrepreneur – I think it’s a mind-set that you’re born with.

A sweeping statement? Possibly – and there will always be notable exceptions – but let’s take a look at a group of people who, while their business is incredibly nasty, are still some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs: drug dealers.

These people specialise in one area, making money in an entrepreneurial way. They exploit their victims in a horrific way but their behaviour is entrepreneurial. Drug dealers are true entrepreneurs – and they probably left school with no formal training in business.

Let’s look at what a successful high-level drug dealer does in business terms:

• Finds a product with consumer appeal. He knows his target audience; he knows where they live and what they want. He understands what makes a good quality product for his target audience – and if his customers’ tastes change or a new product is developed he is quick to seize the new opportunity.
• Buys it in bulk from a wholesaler. He has an established supply chain, possible different suppliers for each separate product. He has negotiated a good bulk price for the product.
• Knows the right size of product to sell on to the consumer and repackages the bulk product to suit their needs. He knows what size sells to each of his customer groups and has the ability and work premises needed to cut the bulk product into saleable sizes.
• Adds on his profit but ensures the product still represents value for money. He adds on his own mark-up thus creating a very large profit for himself – but not too large that his product is higher priced than his competitors’ drugs or unaffordable for his buyers.
• Uses a simple ‘just-in-time’ distribution network. He doesn’t hold a lot of bulk stock. Holding too much stock of the product is not only costly but, for him, dangerous.
• Employs sales staff who ‘respect’ him. He has a network of people who do the selling – presumably if they are ineffective or cheat him he ‘sacks’ them. While he probably uses fear (and the drugs) as a tool to keep his staff in order he does engender respect.
• Is mindful of the competition. He knows his competition intimately. He knows their prices and the quality of their products. He uses this information to ensure he keeps ahead of them in business.
• Manages large financial reserves. He has control of his finances – possibly better control than some large corporations. He understands where to hide his money, how to make it work hard for him, how to convert it from dirty money into clean money and how to pay only the tax applicable on his respectable businesses. He has a big incentive to be careful with his finances – if he messes up he could end up in jail or dead.

So, while no-one would ever hold a drug dealer up as a fine example of a businessperson, he is an entrepreneur and he’s very unlikely to have an MBA.

Since 1905 Rolex has been synonymous with luxury. When you think of Rolex you think of precision, sophistication, beauty, wealth, success and Roger Federer! It’s an iconic brand and this year it was rated the top UK consumer superbrand above Apple, Microsoft, British Airways, Coca Cola and Google.

Rolex has achieved mythical status. It has never produced a mass-market watch. It has resisted the temptation to become attainable. It has always held to its core brand values of luxury and high quality. This dedication to exclusivity has made it a household name – even though most of us will only ever be able to admire it from afar.

Rolex is a clever brand – one that has worked hard to achieve its place at the very top. It controls all of the production process in-house. Every essential part of its watches from the movements and dials to the watch straps are manufactured by Rolex at its Swiss production facility. This alone gives them the edge over many of their competitors. They can assure quality at every stage. But quality is not enough to make it a superbrand. Promotion and marketing has done that for Rolex.

Right from its early days, Rolex became involved with sports promotion and sponsorship. They have links to high-profile sporting events including The Open golf tournament, Wimbledon, the Australian Open, The Ryder Cup, Le Mans 24 hour race and the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race. They even invented The Grand Slam of Eventing equestrian event which includes Kentucky, Badminton and Burghley. This year Rolex will be the official timekeeper for the F1 Grand Prix series – a move which will take their brand across the globe. They are also the title sponsor for the first race: ‘Formula 1 Rolex Australian Grand Prix’ in mid-March 2013.

In addition Rolex have carefully created an image of themselves as a brand for action men and woman. This action branding reinforces the idea that Rolex watches are durable, strong, tough under pressure and can be trusted to work in extreme situations. Ian Fleming chose Rolex for James Bond and Sean Connery wore a Rolex in the first Bond film, Dr No. More recently, James Cameron took a Rolex on his dive to the Deepest Place on Earth and a number of high-profile explorers wear Rolex watches. Add these to the famous sports men and women they sponsor – and the ones who just choose to wear them – and you have a brand worn by active, exciting, highly successful people.

Rolex might never touch your everyday life. You may never own one or even see one being worn by someone else. But you know their core values; you know what a Rolex means. Rolex have made sure through clever marketing that you know precisely what they stand for. And this is what makes Rolex a superbrand.